Open source software firms have made a push for the business world for quite some time now. The idea of running a business on software whose source code is readily available for anyone to tinker with gained considerable validity when IBM announced its full on support for Linux on its hardware, including z Series mainframes, in 1999.

The potency and capability of open source software is not in doubt. Open source software powers much of the Internet: Linux, the Apache Web server, sendmail, and OpenSSL are just a few important Internet technologies that are open source, among many.

In August this year, the city of Munich completed its two-year switch to Kolab, an open source based suite of groupware and collaboration tools such as email and calendaring. Across the city’s 50 departmentsb there are now some 60,000 Kolab mail boxes, said Kolab CEO George Greve at a conference for the IT departments of the European Commission and European Parliament, in Brussels on Tuesday.

Financial innovation company R3 has made its Corda distributed ledger platform open source, granting the global developer community universal access to its source code to encourage collaboration, review and contribution to the platform.

R3 has just made its Corda distributed ledger platform open source, granting the developers access to its source code to encourage collaboration, review and contribution to the platform. This news comes at a time when R3 needs it most, after it recently lost a few of its member banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Last weekend I attended the GNOME Core Apps hackfest that I helped organize here in Berlin.

It was the first time I participated in a Core Apps hackfest and I must say I am really glad with how it all went. I felt like there was a perfect balance of planning, working, and just hanging out together. If you want to know more about the planned items, check out this very complete post by Carlos Soriano.

Last weekend I attended the Core Apps hackfest in Berlin. This was a reboot of the Content Apps hackfest we held last year around the same time of year, with a slightly broader focus. One motivation behind these events was to try and make sure that GNOME has a UX focused event in Europe at the beginning of the Autumn/Spring development cycle, since this is a really good time to come together and plan what we want to work on for the next GNOME version.

Another two weeks have passed and I'm blogging about another 2 conferences. This year both Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation and Google Test Automation Conference happened on the same day. I was attending ISTA in Sofia during the day and watching the live stream of GTAC during the evenings. Here are some of the things that reflected on me:

Before I became a Fedora Project contributor, I went to an event in the central west region of Brazil called FGSL ( “Fórum Goiano de Software Livre”), which had its 12th edition in 2015. It was a great event, and now ( 2016) that I have joined the Fedora Community as a contribuitor I thought about being there again, this time representing the Fedora Project.

And if that seems selfish, I only have so much time for evangelism. Besides, if the advantage of free software for developers is that they are free to pursue their own interests, I see no reason that ordinary users can't claim the same privilege. I may be irked by the inaccurate statements about free software, or wish Linux more popular, but neither really matters compared to my everyday experience on the desktop. The diversity that I enjoy exists precisely because free software development is bound by considerations other than the commercial.

In contrast to most parts of the framework, the fundamental low-level protocols, which define the interaction between parent and child components have remained unchanged since the very first Genode version. From this interplay, the entire architecture follows. That said, certain initial design choices were not perfect. They partially resulted from limitations of the kernels we used during Genode's early years and from our pre-occupation with a certain style of programming. Over the years, the drawbacks inherent in our original design became more and more clear and we drafted rough plans to overcome them. However, reworking the fundamental protocols of a system that already accommodates hundreds of component implementations cannot be taken light-handily. Because of this discomfort, we repeatedly deferred the topic - until now. With the rapidly growing workloads carried by Genode, we deliberately decided to address long-standing deficiencies rather than adding the features we originally planned according to the road map.

Two founders of the Kubernetes project at Google, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, recently announced their new company, Heptio. The company has raised an $8.5M series A investment round led by Accel, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. Heptio will bring Kubernetes to enterprises in order to accelerate software development, increase infrastructure efficiency and reduce the complexity of managing software at scale.

Beda became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners in late 2015, and it looks like this startup will have solid funding and lots of experience to work with. The company's concept is that Kubernetes can significantly reduce infrastructure costs and simplify operations at many businesses, but it is too hard to get up and running with the platform.

On November 29, 2016 the Node.js Foundation announced a major effort to help further grow and stabilize node.js on different virtual machines (VMs). By enabling node.js to be VM-neutral, the hope is that it can be used by application developers on a wider variety of platforms and devices.

The Node.js Foundation is a multi-stakeholder effort that was first launched by the Linux Foundation in June 2015 in an effort to help stabilize the fractured node.js community.

SiFive’s Arduino ready “HiFive1” dev kit features its 320MHz FE310, the first MCU using the open RISC-V ISA. Also, Samsung is rumored to be using RISC-V.

In July, San Francisco-based startup SiFive unveiled the first SoCs based on the open source RISC-V platform: A Linux-ready octa-core Freedom U500 and a FreeRTOS-based Freedom E300. Now, the company has gone to Crowd Supply to sell an open source, Arduino compatible HiFive1 development board based on the FE300 that it claims is the fastest Arduino compatible in the world, 10 times faster even than Intel’s Arduino 101.

Technical advent calendars work in a similar way: Each day a new treat is revealed; sometimes it's an article explaining a new tip or technique, whereas other times the treat is an exercise to help you hone your skills. Tech advent calendars, although secular, run at the same time in the holiday season. This means they'll be kicking off on December first, giving the opportunity to learn all month long.

This last Saturday 26th was celebrated the #LinuXatUNI event at National University of Engineering. There were more than 250 people registered, but we have only 84 attended, though. I was surprised about this! It might be the upcoming final exams at universities in Lima or the early time on weekend.

Part of Node.js Foundation’s mission is growing Node.js everywhere. The Node.js platform is already available on a variety of VMs, like Samsung’s JerryScript, a lightweight JavaScript engine for the Internet of Things. While many steps are needed to allow Node.js to work in VM environments outside of V8, the work the Node.js API working group and ChakraCore are doing are important steps to offer greater choice.

When we started development of the Open Chemistry project we looked quite seriously at requiring C++11, and I was dissuaded at the time by several in our community. We ended up using some small parts of C++11 that could be made optional and falling back to Boost implementations/empty macro definitions. At the time I think it was perhaps a little too aggressive, but if I could go back I would have told my former self to go for it. The project was new, had few existing users, and was mainly targeting the desktop. Add to that the fact that adoption often takes a few years and there is the cost of supporting older compilers.

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Hopefully we can maintain a good middle ground that best serves our users, and be cognizant of the cost of being too conservative or too aggressive. Most developers are eager to use the latest features, and it can be extremely frustrating to know there is a better way that cannot be employed. I think there is a significant cost to being too conservative, but I have seen other projects that update and change too aggressively lose mind share.

We’re publishing this as an emergency bulletin for our customers and the larger web community. A few hours ago a zero day vulnerability emerged in the Tor browser bundle and the Firefox web browser. Currently it exploits Windows systems with a high success rate and affects Firefox versions 41 to 50 and the current version of the Tor Browser Bundle which contains Firefox 45 ESR.

If you use Firefox, we recommend you temporarily switch browsers to Chrome, Safari or a non-firefox based browser that is secure until the Firefox dev team can release an update. The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on your Windows workstation. The exploit is in the wild, meaning it’s now public and every hacker on the planet has access to it. There is no fix at the time of this writing.

Election security experts concerned about voting machines are calling for an audit of ballots in the three states where the presidential election was very close: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. We agree. This is an important election safety measure and should happen in all elections, not just those that have a razor-thin margin.

Voting machines, especially those that have digital components, are intrinsically susceptible to being hacked. The main protection against hacking is for voting machines to provide an auditable paper trail.

The government was warned of the risks surrounding its controversial smart meter programme four years ago, according to a leaked internal report seen by The Register, but appears to have largely ignored those concerns.

A review of the programme from March 2012 highlights the vulnerability of smart meters to cyber-attacks, and flagged estimates that the scheme could leave the taxpayer out of pocket by £4.5bn rather than save consumers cash.

Some 53 million smart meters are due to be installed in residences and small businesses by the end of 2020 at an estimated cost of £11bn.

So far 3.5 million have been installed. The government has said it expects the scheme will save £17bn. However, a recent delayed report found that benefits to the consumer could be much smaller than originally thought.

Today, November 29, 2016, the GStreamer development team released the second maintenance update to the stable GStreamer 1.10 series of the open-source and cross-platform pipeline-based multimedia framework used on almost all Linux-based systems.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.